By Robert Reid
An Okie expat and his 76-year-old uncle aim to summit the Black Mesa in the USA’s most unlucky and unwanted rectangle.
The road’s empty and rising slightly. I lean forward in the driver’s seat and look through the windshield to the biggest skies I’ve ever seen. An immense block of sea-blue smeared in white [...]
By Rosemary Davis
A visit to the home of the Mississippi blues.
Sometimes the answers aren’t easy. Driving down endless country roads—seeing nothing but identical rows of crops covering the flat, uneven land, one ponders the meaning of life.
But in one Southern town, the meaning of life can be summed up in two words: cotton and the [...]
By Nicholas Fox
Communing with Oakland’s greatest writer in the bar he used to call home.
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. —Jack London
He was a dropout, a hobo, an oyster poacher. He was an excellent sailor, a less excellent rancher, a deeply committed socialist, a boxing fanatic, an [...]
By Michael Shapiro
Wayfaring author returns annually to revel in joys of summer after arduous journeys.
At first glance it might seem surprising to find the roving travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux spending his summers on Cape Cod. Best known for unflinching accounts of extended, gritty journeys, Theroux helped redefine modern travel writing with his 1975 [...]
By Catherine Watson
From the mountaintop road above Kvivik, green slopes fell steeply away to the sea, and the sea swept my eyes outward, over the village, to the soft shapes of other islands drifting in the pale blue distance. More than a thousand years of Faroe Islands history lay in that view. [...]
By Mary Jo McConahay
In later years…President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Longworth, congratulated me every time we saw each other: “You got out. So wise.”
—“Reflections on Glory Reflected,” in United States: Essays 1952-1992
The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our [...]
By Chris Epting
In my mind, travelers are hunters. What do you hunt for when you travel? Experiences, people, souvenirs? We all hunt for something.
I hunt for places.
We were in Oslo, Norway, my teenaged son and I, spending a few days before hopping a ship with Quark Expeditions to explore around the Arctic [...]
by Tim Weed
An American in Off-Limits Cuba
A decade ago I was riding along the Havana Malecón in a white and blue ’57 Ford with a four-cylinder Toyota engine. The taxi driver overheard my companions speaking English in the back seat. “Where you from?” he asked in Spanish.
“Estados Unidos,” I replied.
“I thought so. [...]
by Kim Brown Seely
A Girls’ Trip to Italy
Men have their golf weekends, their guided fly-fishing, and that ultimate male-bonding ritual, the heli-ski week, which costs practically as much as a child’s education. But when it comes time for women to get away, we often sabotage ourselves with convenient excuses. As a [...]
by Tim Leffel
Hidden in a remote Mexican jungle hours from any large city or airport, the sculpture garden of Sir Edward James is like a dream manifested in the waking world.
It all starts when I land on a travel magazine article, one containing photos of structures that don’t look like anything that could [...]
